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The Open-Source Detector

Posted by timothy on from the lie-detection dept.

McDutchie writes "With open-source related lawsuits on the rise, a market is developing for automated tools that detect the presence of open-source code within larger application development environments. Palamida Inc. stepped in with IP Amplifier 3.0, essentially a search tool and a database that consists of more than 38 million of the most commonly used open-source files. Something Google-inspired called CodeRank is claimed to match code against the database. Hmm... maybe someone should run it on this, or even this." Of course, some open source code is perfectly welcome in commercial software, even if that software's code is not itself open; it's no secret or surprise that Microsoft, for instance, has taken advantage in some products of BSD-licensed code.

5 of 340 comments (clear)

  1. Isn't that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    what MS anti-spyware suite does, when I first installed it it labeled vnc and something else (can't remember now.. ) as spyware.. open source infection indeed..

  2. Email from the net nazis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    We have scanned your computer and found the following files that are in violation off corporate IP protection policy for development: /usr/include/signal.h /usr/include/socket.h /usr/include/stdio.h /opt/java/src.zip

    Please remove them.

  3. Re:Bah... humbug. by graywolf001 · · Score: 3, Funny

    You dont get the point of the whole thing at all. This is not for searching open source code that you could use.
    This is so that you can detect OS code in your own source code. Presumably if you're managing a commercial software company you'd want to know if your developers have simply been copying code from some OS project.
    It can do binaries too if you actually read the thing.

    Now if you'll excuse me, I have some code I need to obfuscate ;-)

  4. Compare with "grep" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    I wonder what would come up if they compared their own source code with GNU grep?

  5. Re:DLL encryption will render this ineffective by mr_z_beeblebrox · · Score: 4, Funny

    You downloaded a tarball, you extracted it, you opened it in a text editor, you copied and pasted the code. And then you tell your boss that you did that "on accident"? Can anyone explain this to me?

    Muscle memory?